My life as a secondary school science teacher.

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Collaborative Timeline on the Evolution of Life on Earth

I wanted to do something a bit fun with this. I thought if I made it online, I could make it a whole class collaborative project. I listed the different events in the history of life on Earth and gave my students a brief run down of what the different events were. Then asked them to create a very short summary answering the following questions:

When is this event occurring (provide the best estimates of time period)?

Describe the event that you are researching. Outline key features of the event. Provide references for your research.

What evidence (such as fossils where possible) do scientists use to describe this event? Include images/video.

How does this event contribute to the diversity in the evolution of life on Earth? I.e. what implications does this event have on future life on Earth?

I then asked my students to peer assess another groups summaries against the same above criteria and fix up any suggestions that the other group made on their own summaries. Finally this edited version was to be uploaded onto a class timeline generated on Timeglider. I’m not sure this was the best Web2.0 tool to use for this purpose. It didn’t allow collobration between members so basically we all used the same login and password to create this timeline. In future I would like to look for another tool that allows each pair of students to create an account and then they upload their work from this source. It would aid in me keeping track of who’s submitted their work and who hasn’t. My class’ timeline can be found here.